Also Skybiff: That Skyrim Playthrough

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It’s below, in case you missed it. It shows off one of the dungeons, some of the scale of the environments, mammoths, and of course the dragon vs giant bit. Comedy falling giant. He doesn’t look happy. Ah, that’s videogames.

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Re: the stealth archery bit: y’know, if I was standing in a cave talking to someone and he got shot through the head with an arrow, I’d have more of a response than just warily peering around into the darkness.

Playing the leaked Deus Ex Beta (Don’t judge me, I’ve pre-ordered Collectors edition)
I realized that if I would ever become a NPC – I’d stand with my back pressed against the wall, as far from any possible loot as I can and I’d never ever blink.

I’m currently replaying Morrowind (again, different slant this time, and still finding new stuff thanks to how obscure some of the existing content is, and thanks to mods as well) and I’m remembering how magnificently, gloriously weird it was. (Not to mention it having one of my favourite somewhat romantic scenes from any RPG, that being becoming Ahnassi’s ‘very special friend.’)

Really though, everything about Morrowind was… well, it was breathtaking, wasn’t it? Even playing through again this time, I still smile at the really crazy architecture, that kind of thing makes me so happy. Yes, non-standard architecture makes me happy. I was never normal. I could go on and on about the wildlife, too, oh gods the wildlife, those jellyfish things and all, and the bizarre juxtaposition of the dwemer and their ruins. How fun it is being a vampire or werewolf. So many different angles for play, so many possible strange storylines.

And here? Here I’m just seeing Age of Conan with Bukkits of Blud™ (someone’s been taking art direction tips from Dragon Age, not to mention part of the plot of Dragon Age, too). I don’t know, I’m just not getting Morrowind imaginative or crazy from this. And I’m more excited about my Morrowind playthrough right now than I am about this. The thing is is that I have memories just a couple of hours old of Morrowind to compare this against, and this is found to be wanting.

I see male power fantasies, I see a buff man shoving his metawang into a dragon’s head, and I see things that are boring now but things of the like that Freud would’ve had a field day with way back when, but I don’t see creative, I see creative bankruptcy. If they’re planning on coming through with this Morrowind strangeness and it’s all just not hollow words (like I strongly suspect), then why don’t they just show some of it? If they really have 300 hours of content, then it wouldn’t kill them to show 10 seconds of Morrowind strangeness.

Unless, of course, they felt that 10 seconds of Morrowind strangeness would meet their quota, that’s all they’ve actually got, and thus they can’t show it because otherwise–gasp!–we’ll have seen it all. Spoilers and all that. Blargh. I don’t want to be cynical but everything about this is saying that it’s made for big, dumb, unimaginative people who like to hit things hard. That’s… not my cup of tea.

I don’t know I found morrowind boring and repetitive. Every town sort of looked the same, I felt like there was a pretty bland brown pallet to the whole thing. At the time though I do recall pooping my pants running around the water for 10 minutes in circles watching the awesome effects. I never really go anywhere in the main plot, I guess I just ran around, did all the side quests I could find and never touched the main quest.

I guess that was because elder scrolls were like the only games you could play and not follow a main plot, so it always seems like a crime to play elder scrolls games ‘correctly’.

I enjoyed the setting of oblivion even though it was generic fantasy. I LIKE generic fantasy. I did get bored with the main plot and the autoleveling blah blah usual complaints. But they figured out most of my oblivion problems in fallout 3, and I expect this game to be pretty awesome, doubly so with the cool things I’m seeing in videos.

Anyway, will buy this, based on seeing how cool mammoths were walking around and the rain spell. Stupid things like that are what tend to sell me.

It’s an e3 demo. It’s going to show the big showy action combat. We didn’t really see ANY architecture in this video, it’s a bit unfair to suggest that there’s not going to be any weird architecture.

If anything I think this shows off a fair amount of unorthodoxy in that it IS an e3 demo, yet we see non-hostile monsters. The big giants roaming the tundra with their mammoths, that you can talk to? (The giants not the mammoths). That’s pretty cool, in my books, and certainly not straightforward generic fantasy.

Also I seem to recall a fair amount of buff men shoving metawangs into things in Morrowind, too.

Personally, I adored the Bloodmoon expansion of Morrowind, that environment always clicked better for me than much of Vvardenell, so if this is going to be an entire game of that, colour me interested.

Besides, what we want and what the wider market (especially the consoles) are willing to buy into is probably different. I suspect Bethesda are reluctant to stray too far for realism-fantasy for fear of alienating the mass market.

To some degree that a shame, but OTOH it allows them to invest mega-bucks in making the Skyrim so it’s not an entirely bad trade-off.

“I see male power fantasies, I see a buff man shoving his metawang into a dragon’s head”

(crosses off first box on Wulf Skyrim Bingo sheet) Seek help, dude. This obsession you have with the ‘male power fantasy’ is not healthy, and bringing it up in every Skyrim thread (don’t make me link to them all) adds nothing to the discussion. Gaming is a medium dominated by the ‘x kills y’ model, largely due to the fact that this is the simplest form of interaction to simulate in a computer, simplest by a massive margin. What would you prefer to see? Slender androgynous characters sitting in circles sewing? Is that the right kind of fantasy for you? Yes, they’ve chosen the male human again but, dude, they will probably do so right up until the game’s release because it generates the least confusion about their product.

And I take issue with putting Morrowind on such a high pedestal. It was a piece of greatness, that much is true, but for everything it did right there were still plenty of things it got horribly wrong.

@Gerard: Guess what, Solstheim and Skyrim look the same in the lore too! Who’d have thunk it eh? Also, Nords aren’t really all that big on mushroom houses.

I really don’t get the ”I was expecting it to look like Morrowind” attitude. It’s not going to. It never will. But at least it looks more interesting than Oblivion and actually looks like the lore tells it does (unlike Oblivions lolimmeanttobeajunglenotHampshire obviously).

It’s possible that that’s what would actually happen if you dropped a giant in a standing position; after all, a giant would have a lot of momentum, and that wasn’t “scripted” (animated) it was physics simulation. So fair play for using physics simulation, it’ll pay off for you when a giant corpse hits a fort or a forest or the top of a mountain in an equivalent situation :)

Skyrim doesn’t seem to have much simulated hit response yet. So when the player attacks the mammoth, the first thing you see is the creature attacking you. It doesn’t seem to feel the hit, but it does KNOW you attacked it.

In the case of the dragon picking up the the giant: only the position of the giant appears to be manipulated by the pickup. Because the giant is killed by the pick up, it is sent into ragdoll mode, but the effect of the claws on the giant isn’t simulated, and the whole ragdoll responds as one item to the pick up (you’d expect his arms and legs to lag behind a little bit, when he is grabbed and dragged by the chest).

Maybe simulating it more accurately would put too much strain on the xbox, or maybe they just haven’t quite finished the giant-grabbing code yet. I hope they can finish it before release, or at least allow me to mod it in :P.

You do know these are games, right? Not real life? That to properly simulate every single detailed little nuance of physical injury and movement would involve more time, money and programming oomph than would ever be feasible? I noticed that the guy in the cave got sliced across the neck and apparently didn’t fall over cluthchin his throat but then right on the back of that I thought “It’s only a game” followed by “heh, I can hack people across the throat.”.

@Urael
Of course, but I would still like to hack it in. Especially since most of the tech is already there. That giant turned to a ragdoll, and you can apply constraints to parts of ragdolls, and move those around. But in this case, it looks as if they are moving the root of the object around instead, which would make the whole thing move as one solid object.
Its more about consistency than realism. Apparently, when someone gets hit by an arrow in the chest, that person gets knocked back by the impact of a moving object(1:50), but when a dragon plants his claws into a giant and drags the giant along, that rule suddenly doesn’t apply anymore.
Of course, it would be consistent if that would happen every time a dragon picked something up, but a few moments later we see the legs of a guard flailing around after being picked up by a dragon. So the code is in there, it just hasn’t been used for the claw pick up yet. I’m guessing they first want to create a special animation for the claw pick up.

After watching videos all day of games designed purely around how they look in a 30 second presentation and managing to look as deep as the perhiperal advertisements they are, that bit where he calls in the storm was breathtaking.

YES. Although to be fair this wasn’t in a conference, and they seem to show more of the game off in these sessions (see: ME3).

It makes me sad that so many are already ragging on this because it doesn’t have screens filled with numbers everywhere. :(

It already looks like a huge improvement over Oblivion (which was still a great game, I favour Morrowind as much as the next person but it had flaws too), and is heads and shoulders above any other fantasy RPG (and plenty of other games full stop) due to come out.

Haha I liked how the interviewer was like “And so you start the game on your way to your execution right?” and the guy being interviewed was like “dude, we’re watching the PC fight a dragon in the middle of a thunderstorm, stfu and furthermore it’s an Elder Scrolls game so of course”. He didn’t actually say those words but it was in his face I swear.

Dear sweet Horace, I completely agree. When you’ve got such a detailed and beautiful landscape to look at, why would you slap jarring plain white text (and that ugly level bar) right over the top of it? If that stays, it’ll be a day-one mod for sure.

Yup. I wouldn’t be surprised if it even changes before release. Looked very clunky and out of place and I don’t remember it ever being that in your face in previous games. UI’s tend to undergo a lot of tweaks so maybe they will catch on and save modders some trouble.

I hope they have more factions than the three they mentioned there. In oblivion I found that each of them directed you to different styles of gameplay which provided a good deal of variety and interesting storylines.

What they showed looks good though. I don’t care about graphics as much if the gameplay is satisfying; but hopefully we’ll get both.

There will definitely be more than three, Howard was probably just giving away the basic ‘Fighters/Mages/Thieves’ trinity as a bonus today. There is always going to be an assassin faction, people just love killing dudes too much for there not to be.

Sadly I already doubt we’ll see a return to Morrowind levels of Faction-y goodness however.

Easily my favourite quote of the entire thing – especially since they were demoing the engine’s capabilities at the time. No need to just imagine plants in your sterile chlorophyll-less worlds anymore, now you can fully look at them with your own eyes! Imagine that!

I am impressed with fights. They seem really intense and punchy. Also we see clearly that the long range view is no better than on Oblivion – at least on 360. Hopefully they’ll take advantage of modern PCs in the view distance setting…

Mmm, the fights looked decent, but I was disappointed that the player didn’t go flying when the mammoth gored him, or seem to suffer any real problems when the giant smacked him with the club. Obviously plenty can change yet, but it would be nice if fighting those big creatures was actually a different experience to fighting smaller creatures. Also it didn’t really show how you will actually fight dragons, but I suppose it makes sense for them to want to save that for when people actually play the game. It didn’t look very exciting in the trailer.

My favorite part was on the hill with the giants and mammoths walking along. It does look great, and the animation! Oh, so much better. The cave with the water was nice too.

Not surprising given how hardcore members of the Oblivion community have said they easily racked up well over 200. Morrowind was probably off the chart. These are big games with a lot to do in them should you have the desire.

Certainly looks like it’s got some great ideas in there. The world looked a bit sparse to me, and the graphics were incredibly 360-limited (obviously) – hopefully both of those will be ramped up for the pc version, i can’t imagine that they won’t try to go toe-to-toe with the witcher 2 on that.

The dragon fights didn’t look nearly as epic as i’d hoped either. The second one especially just seemed to be the dragon doing fly-pasts of the tower with you casting a spell each time it was overhead (although as trump cards go, the stormcaller was pretty good). Hopefully that’s a product of trailer-making godmode and a bad choice of fighting style, but i’d definitely like to see that ramped up a little.

The animations and artwork in general look great though, if it can wrap a ramped-up pc version around a decent set of stories/rpg-elements it’ll be pretty great.

I’m normally not someone to bring up graphics aside from the overall graphic style, but oh my..
They sounded so excited talking about the graphics, and if this was 2005, I could see why. But with isn’t 2005, this is 2011. My budget graphics card produces less blurry textures on my very old hardware on old games. It wouldn’t stick out so much if they didn’t bring it up themselves.

Apart from that, ever since the horrible UI of Oblivion, I’m sceptical. Behind it was a good game, but the UI was needlessly shitty, cluttered, unresponsive and unhelpful, all because it was built for console. I’m afraid that Skyrim, like Oblivion, could have the same problems, especially seeing that melee still doesn’t seem to go beyond frantically clicking lmb. I’ll rant about this in late november in more detail, I guess..

I think that’s actually mainly because the design is far less colourful and bloomy. it looks more adult, more realistic. I just hope the NPC’s are convincing. the resolution of the textures is les important to me than that and animations. but all these things can be horrible in release as long as the trusty fanbased modding community is offered some good tools.

I hope this game turns out good. Can’t say I’m excited for it though. Each preview I read for Oblivion made time go slower, with Skyrim I just don’t even care. Maybe it’s Oblivion’s fault for leaving a bad taste in my mouth but this video just seems so bland.

Also why would they demo it on the 360? Is there not much of a graphical improvement on the PC? It might have just been the video quality but the graphics seem to be to Fallout 3 what those were to Oblivion, very minor improvements. Of course mods will help.

A combination of devs thesedays favouring lugging xboxes to events like this over PCs and the PC version not being as suitable to show for some reason? I would have liked to have seen the PC version too, but there are usually plenty of fairly legit reasons why they show it on a console in this situation.

They show it on 360 because a) More of their audience will have one and, b) to show how fabulous it looks on the LESSER hardware. Can you imagine if they’d shown the PC footage? There’d be swarms of Xbox players worried about how it would play on their $300 systems.

But Radiant AI never happened. This is the first time we’ll see it. It was never included in Oblivashi…..Oblivion because Bethesda couldn’t get it to work properly. Though I doubt it was like the STALKER AI problem where the NPCs would complete the game for you.

Races? Any others than human? “you can be who you want, male or female” sounded kinda disappointing. Not too excited by the graphics/story, either, but hell, I’ll be the first to cheer if it’s any good.

Again all I can say is watch the animations of the enemies in RAGE then compare them to this….really is a wrold of differnece..I want to see some sort of advancement in enemy moveemnt..in the Rage gameplay trailers if someone is shot in the face they hold the face…in the leg they limp etc etc..the undead part looked bad in my opinion…well not bad but something from 5 years ago…I think Mass Effect led the way in animation and 3d quality of characters\enemies….and alot of the new games seem to have carried this on…but not here by the looks of it…

I don’t know that I agree. What I saw was lovely. The animations on display were much improved over Oblivion. The giants especially had a great sense of bulk, mass and scale to them. And the dragons…wow. I’m really looking forward to this running on my PC. In fact, I was quite excited about showing this off to non-gamer friends. “Check me out…I’m fighting dragons!”

Shut the fuck up with your useless armchair critic complaints and enjoy the fact that this game looks absolutely amazing. Some of you RPS commenters always find something wrong with even the best looking stuff, I swear to god. Quit playing video games if videos like this just make you whine.

Seriously, Geoff Keighley needs to shut the hell up for a bit. Stop playing the part of an interviewer and just be an interviewer. At least feign some fricken’ awe. GOSH. It’s like he’s just going through the motions regardless of what’s on screen. Terrible.

Can I build a castle? I want to build a castle. And maybe a town as well. A castle and a small town, with a little functioning economy. NPCs getting up in the morning, going off to work (mining, harvesting crops, hunting, etc), going to the pub after work, running away from dragons burning the pub, praising me for killing said dragons, going home and going to sleep. That would be nice.

And something like the House Hlaalu quests from Morrowind. I missed those in Oblivion. Some of my favorite parts of Morrowind.

But even if it doesn’t have that: it looks beautiful. The dragons seem to move really well. It has a great scale of creatures. Changing weather, seemingly (or is that just the spell?). A lot of good things. I’m excited.

Really dislike Todd Howard, don’t trust him, don’t trust any game he puts his name to, as long as he is at Bethesda I have no faith in the TES series.

His idea of “creative vision” comes across as very narrow and with a short attention span.

Kudos to them for the animation and letting you talk to giants. Combat looks weaksauce though as far as I’m concerned.
Agree with what others have said here – there isn’t enough feedback for either enemies or the player taking hits from combat and size of enemy seems to have no impact on that side of things either.

Damn those rocks are still so jaggedy polygony! And the fur on that mammoth is very stiff, and those dragons have awkward blips in their animations when turning, and picking up that giant and dropping it looked dead wrong. And I bet I’m going to want the combat to just be a little more fluid. It seems whenever they raise the bar with some stuff the areas that are last gen stand out all the worse. Still it looks like they’ve done the best that is currently possible and this is definitely a game worth playing. The more realistic they get the more I’m going to resent the lack of these things, and if the lack of a health system that even begins to be as sophisticated as anything else in the games continues, it might make me stop playing or design my own one in flash.
-So instead of a bar you have a body that can go through various conditions, have less blood in it, burn fat, be in a state of shock, have an amount of oxygen in it’s red blood cells and kinds of nutrients and all the body’s muscles individually damagable so you have to limp, and breakable bones and floodable internal organs, but I guess that’s far off. They could still make it so you could heal with magic to make the “incredible, spectacular, special” story of someone who slays thousands of monsters and survives, that is the requirement in action RPGs. I just think it would be great to have a sense that you are in control of something with all that stuff ticking over inside. The industry began to try it in Deus Ex, but they haven’t ever followed it up as far as I can tell.
And I want weapons that aren’t just numbers, but actually perform better in the physics system by being balanced and sharper etc, aswell as being imbued with the strange chemistry of that world’s magic. There will still be numbers and stats, but they will be extrapolated from the weapon’s performance, not just an arbitrary, “I’ve got some of the bigger numbers available in this game”, but weapons that have had to be carefully, physically designed by the developers to function so well. Maybe in the next game? You can see they have a way before they’ve got the “perfect” RPG formula, that they could then doing enthralling takes on. Looking forward to this though, It looks pretty awesomes, I shouldn’t have such high expectations.

Is it just me, or does the engine *still* look like Gamebryo? I hope they aren’t quite done yet with the global lighting, textures, and especially the particle effects. The flames coming off the dragon and the white rain streaks are terrible – you can get much better than that in Unity these days.

All in all, I am really looking forward to this in a major way…I just hope they aren’t scaling back on the graphics to suit consoles – that will piss me off in mega way. I like the open sandbox direction and hope it is *my* idea of sandbox, but I think they have that under control.

I realize there will be modding support and stuff will change that way, but it would nice to spiff up the rough edges before November. These days, particle effects emulating the elements should be extremely convincing with no discernible geometric shapes, animations should be smooth, and polygons shouldn’t be showing off their facets as liberally as I’m seeing here for 2011.

I can’t believe there’s no mention of the fact that we *still* haven’t seen NPCs in action –specifically, that mysterious new conversation system that apparently no one outside some piece of marketing blurb released six months ago has ever seen in action.

I couldn’t care less about whatever bump-mapped environmentally lit per-pixel normal multitexturing they put on their mammoths (it looks pretty two-years-ago anyway); the absolute first thing that the Gamebryo engine NEEDS fixed is the horrible, immersion-breaking, stiff, sock-puppet acting of the NPCs.

THAT’S what they should be demoing and what people should be asking about. Goddamnit >:(